User blog:Pinkguy the b0ss/SM64DS Rant (QUARANTINED)
WARNING : This is your last chance to turn back from this bullshit. If you don't want to read this, LEAVE. If you do, scroll down prepare yourself to cringe badly. ..... Sigh.... So, yeah. If you've ever read any of my game reviews in the past then you know that I've never reviewed a bad game before. I've covered masterpieces such as Super Mario Sunshine and Donkey Kong Country. You know, some of the best games ever made. The game series I come back to the most time and time again is Mario. To cut to the chase, let's focus on Super Mario 64. It's fast-paced, challenging, and full of non-stop fun, being a game that I can pick up any day and have a blast with. Also, despite it being over 20 years old, I still think the game plays very well to this day, controls, physics and all. Now, let's fast forward a few years. In the early 2000s, when the Gamecube and Gameboy Advance were still current, the Nintendo DS was announced as a "third pillar" to this pair of systems. In order to demonstrate the "power" of the DS, Nintendo announced a remake of Super Mario 64 for the system. At the time, this was impressive. A full remake of SM64 for this new handheld? That must be great, right? Right? Well... Back in 2007-2008 or so, I got a DS Lite with New Super Mario Bros. bundled with it. As soon as I saw Super Mario 64 DS at Toys R Us one day, I immediately wanted it based on the name alone, since I loved watching SM64 Youtube videos and wanted to actually play the game. Back then, I was amazed and loved it at first, but stopped playing it several years later for one reason or another. Today, I decided to revisit it due to getting an N64 and Super Mario 64 earlier this year, which spiked my curiosity to see if SM64DS has aged well, and if it's still fun to play. In short... NO. Let's get this burden off my shoulders. The story has actually changed quite a bit from the original. Instead of Mario going into Peach's castle and finding nobody there, Mario, Luigi, and Wario enter the castle and don't return, so Yoshi goes in to see what's going on. Honestly, the introduction of the new characters was a bit unneccessary and the game was fine with just Mario, but it's an interesting spin on the original's story. But the story isn't why you're here. Let's get into the meat of this review. Long story short, the gameplay sucks. You start as Yoshi, who is probably the worst character since he can't wall jump, jump dive, break bricks, or pick up anything. Right off the bat, you'll notice that the controls are terrible and not very functional. This is a free-roaming 3D game, but you're forced to use a D-pad, which makes you limited to eight directions. That makes the game unplayable, since the DS doesn't have a very good D-pad. Oh, and yeah, you can use the circle pad on the 3DS, but it's still borderline unplayable since that doesn't magically reprogram the game's controls. Turning around is a huge pain in the ass, the side flip jump is nearly impossible to execute properly, and long jumps are barely possible, usually resulting in a ground pound. Not only that, but jump dives are unneccssarily difficult to pull off due to the button layout on the DS and 3DS, since you need Y, A, and B all at once. Some of the attacks are also delayed as well, taking up to half a second to respond. Adding on to that, they totally fucked up the green koopa shells. Like movement on the ground, steering on that shell is extremely hard, making it too easy to crash. The turning is unresponsive, and if the camera pans in front of you (and it will..... a lot), pushing left suddenly makes you go right and vice-versa. You can also bonk and lose the shell on slopes and the top of ledges, places you would be able to cross just fine in the original. OH, I'm not done yet. Ledges are even glitchier than the original, with your character suddenly grabbing on to the ledge just by standing on it. If you're going to try and grab a ledge by falling onto the side of it from above, good luck, because that works less than 1% of the time. It's basically like this one ledge glitch that occurs very rarely in Mario Sunshine's "Secret of the Yoshi-Go-Round" shine, but multiplied more than 100 times. The swimming is also not as tight as the original, and neither are the controls for cannons. It's even possible to bonk on paintings when trying to enter them, and sometimes, an invisible wall appears out of nowhere and causes you to bonk. Speaking of hitting things, if you walk around in poison gas, you get hit by nothing when you take damage, getting suddenly stopped while you're trying to walk through the gas instead of just being able to continuously walk through it as your health decreases, making sections with poison gas a nightmare. Finally, ice physics. When combined with the controls, it makes the snow levels more frustrating, with the fight against Chief Chilly being one of the worst offenders in this regard. Luigi, the character you fight the boss with, is terrible at combat, so beating the boss is harder than it needs to be. But the thing that cements its awfulness is that you can die during the boss' end-of-fight dialogue. Yes. You can die while his dialogue box is onscreen, which is unavoidable since the text box prevents you from moving. This becomes more common due to the aforementioned ice physics in a toxic combination with the controls, physics, and camera. Not only do the controls and physics suck, but the new characters overcomplicate the game. There are many character-specific stars, and for the ones that require Yoshi specifically, this is a huge problem. You can switch to a character with their cap (which doesn't help much given that the Godawful controls and physics lead to frequent deaths), but for Yoshi, you have to switch in the character room. Did they not learn a thing from Donkey Kong 64? Making tedious, backtrack-based gameplay doesn't make a game fun, it makes it a chore to play. Some characters can also only use a certain ability, with Luigi only using the vanish cap, wario using the metal cap, and mario using the wing cap and balloon powerup from Super Mario World. Also, only Mario can wall jump, open star doors, and fight bowser (enough said). A lot of these stars are "new," but I say that sarcastically because most of the new stars are either a "collect the five silver stars" or "solve a timed switch puzzle" mission. The ones that aren't are just an 8 red coin star for the most part. Wow, original. They're literally just filler and padding for a game that already had a bit of that. And just to pad it out more, you need 80, not 70, stars to beat the game. Thankfully, there are a couple of good new stars, like the one in the mirror room and the second star in Wing Mario Over the Rainbow, but these are extremely few. Next, the health system sucks. Everything seems to do more damage than it originally did. Sometimes, you don't immedietely know how much damage something did since the health decreases so slowly. Many times, you'll suddenly die without a reason why. This is only amplified by the fact that there's occasional screen crunch, and therefore, several enemies that will ambush you from off-screen. Speaking of which... The "new" camera controls are much worse than the original's. Since you have to use the touchscreen to access them, the camera is very awkward to use. It also only moves in unhelpful fixed increments in a large number of levels, including the Bowser levels and RAINBOW RIDE, which is still a bad level, by the way. The camera also still gets caught on course geometry, to an even greater degree than the original. These control and camera flaws make advanced maneuvers nearly impossible, with Luigi's overpowered backflip being the only way you can reach the goal of 80 stars. Also, before I wrap this section up, Wario sucks since he's slow and can barely do anything useful. To end it off, the game still kicks you out of the level when you grab a power star... that isn't an 100 coin star. This inconsistency makes no sense to continue on in a so-called "enhanced" remake, and every star should just keep you in the level so you can grab all the others in one perfect run. Speaking of 100 coin stars, dying still results in your counter being reset, which, considering the game's controls and abundance of bottomless pits, leads to some extremely frustrating 100 coin stars. Getting hit by an enemy or fire near one of these pits always results in death as well, due to the controls and that each gives you a large amount of knockback. Finally, bullies are even harder to hit now, and there is still a huge amount of skinny-as-a-popsicle-stick walkways and platforms, which both lead to tons of deaths for no reason at all. Thankfully, a few platforms were made bigger here and there, but these changes are rare and most platforms are as thin as they were originally. Do I even need to talk about this one? Due to the issues mentioned in the gameplay section, this game is one of the hardest platformers I've ever played. The difficulty is more artificial than Kim Kardashian's fucking ass, being primarily based on those aforementioned problems. Overall, the graphics for this game are horrendous. The colors are washed-out and not pleasing in the slightest. In the original, the colors were so vibrant and full of life, but in this watered-down second-tier DS port, they are not very nice to look at. The only thing that can be considered a slight improvement is the character models, which look ok, and even then, not much better than the original. Ok, ok. I have to give credit where it's due, the minigames are actually pretty fun. Unfortunately, the way you unlock them is a frustrating one. Remember that annoying little shit MIPS from the original game? He was a rabbit that you caught and received a star from on two different occasions. Well, in the remake (or "demake," as I should call it), there are tons more bunnies scattered around the castle. This time, though, they give you Rec Room Keys that you use to unlock minigames in the room of the same name. However, this task is infuriating because of the awful controls of this game. Not only that, but every rabbit is character specific, and since there aren't any character caps anywhere in the castle, the game once again falls into the DK64 trap. Also, just to add more salt to the wound, rabbits you already caught still appear in the castle, and since the game doesn't keep a tally of which ones you've caught, you have no way of telling them apart, meaning you can waste time chasing down rabbits you're unsure if you caught or not, which again, is only lengthened by the fact that the controls are as broken as they are. However, if you do manage to catch a rabbit, the minigames nearly make all the suffering worth it. Most of the Yoshi and Wario minigames aren't particuarly fun, so don't waste your time unlocking them, but the Mario and Luigi minigames are a blast. Especially Luigi's, which are addictive casino games in which you usually play a card game. But, even though these minigames are fun, they do not by any means make SM64DS worth buying and playing. If there's anything that's decent in this shithole besides the minigames, it's the music, specifically the tracks remade from the original. They approximate it fairly well, especially the tracks for Bob-Omb Battlefield and Jolly Roger Bay. However, the new powerup tracks suck, especially the ones for Yoshi's fire breath powerup and the mega mushroom. Every one of these new powerup themes are butchered versions of the extremely fantastic wing cap theme and the great metal cap theme. Some of the voice acting and sound effects suck as well. For starters, Peach's new voice sounds so stupid when compared to the original, and while the actual characters have decent to good voice acting, the clips are compressed beyond belief. Finally, some sound effects are grating, especially the noises the eel from Jolly Roger Bay makes. I think this is a good way to end the soundtrack section, so let's get into the verdict. Overall, this game has not aged well and shouldn't be played unless you want a bad time. If you want to play Super Mario 64, I overwhelmingly reccommend the Nintendo 64 version, since it has a more enjoyable 120 stars rather than a frustrating, barely playable 150 stars. All of the issues of this remake make the game sink from a fun, challenging experience that leaves you satisfied to a desk-poundingly frustrating and exhausting chore of an experience. However, while the minigames, most of the music, a small amount of level design changes, and maybe two or three of the new stars are actually good, it's not enough to save the experience as a whole. This game is truly a product of its time, and should be left in 2004. After all, the novelty of a portable version of Super Mario 64 faded a long time ago, exposing the inexcusable flaws and sins this game commits. From what I've played, this is my least favorite Mario game, and it deserves a spot in my collection of shit, with such "masterpieces" as NES Ghostbusters, NES Jaws, Goldeneye 007, and the SNES WWF games by LJN. Category:Blog posts